Progress

Let's start with a story... Recently I have been getting into running, with gyms closing due to Lockdown 2.0. Whilst out on a run the other night, at around 2km into my journey, a female runner sprints past me. She is approximately my age and size. Yet she ran past me. 

I gave myself a hard time, feeling that I should be faster, asking myself why I was so slow compared to her, trying to speed up to keep pace with her. 

However, around 200m of her running past me, I look up to see she has stopped. The girl stopped, took off her headphones and stopped her watch… she was on the final 200m of her run. Me on the other hand, had still another 3 km to run. 

The more I pondered over this on the rest of my run, the more I compared this to life. And to my horror, I realise I do this every day without realising. Particularly with other women. I beat myself up about my inability to keep pace with people who are at completely different places in their life than I am. 

And if you constantly do this, with an array of different people, you build this expectation, this race for yourself that you will never be able to finish. Which then leads to feelings of failure, when actually people are simply at a different place in their run than you are. And guess what… that is totally fine. You are still running, aren’t you? You are still finishing your race, who cares about what people are doing around you. 

So next time you see someone achieving “more than you”, someone you feel is overtaking you on your journey, just think about where you are at in your run, and how important that is to you. Focus on you, focus on your run. 

Don’t try and keep pace with people in different positions on their journey, keep pace with yourself. And always remember to enjoy the journey!